Men talk to women differently on social media, says science

Watch what you speak

Research has shown that men talk very differently to women on social media and understanding that fact might help you communicate with the opposite sex.

Cross a crowded bar with an extra drink in the hopes of striking up a conversation with an attractive woman? That’s crazy talk, that’s Matthew McConaughey winning another Oscar level idiotic chat. The smart money for intra-gender communication today is on social media. Or ‘The’ social media if you’re over 50.

In what must have been some superfun days at work, researchers from Stony Brook University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Melbourne in Australia analysed some 10 million messages from 65,000 Facebook users. The findings divided neatly along gender lines to such a degree that a language algorithm was able to predict whether the author was a he or a she 90 per cent of the time.

It boiled down to this – women preferred warmer modes of communication with words such as wonderful, happy, birthday, daughter, baby, excited, and thankful. Men tended to gravitate terms such as freedom, liberty, win, lose, battle and enemy.

Which are just so attractive right?

Published in the journal PLOS One, researchers found that women mentioned friends, family and social life more often, whereas men swore more, used angrier and argumentative language, and discussed objects more than people. So far, so predictable with women using language that was characteristic of compassion and politeness while men was more hostile and impersonal.

But here’s the kicker though – and a lesson any man who communicates with women via social media would do well to learn. According to co-author H Andrew Schwartz (a name which screams lady killer BTW), “While some previous work suggests men are generally more assertive, the language in Facebook did not reflect this, showing women use slightly more assertive language than men.”

In other words, keep it light, fuzzy and affirming but don’t push your luck or you will be beat down.